Smoking the father is more dangerous to the "fetal heart" than we imagine

Smoking the father is more dangerous to the "fetal heart" than we imagine

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Smoking parents and not just mothers can increase the risk of heart disease, according to a new study.

"Men who become fathers should quit smoking," said Dr. Jiabei Kein of the Central South University School of Public Health in Changsha, China, who is a participant in the study. "Parents are a major source of secondhand smoke for pregnant women and seem to be more harmful to fetuses than women Smokers themselves ".

It has long been known that smoking of pregnant women increases the risk of developing fetuses with health problems, including premature birth, low birth weight and birth defects. But the risk of heart problems in particular was not as clear as was the potential impact of smoking for expectant parents.

To assess the risk of heart disease caused by smoking by a parent, Ken and his colleagues analyzed data from 125 previous studies that included a total of 8.8 million parents around the world. Studies have examined the issue of smoking of pregnant mothers, smoking of parents during pregnancy and exposure of pregnant women to secondhand smoke.

Of the children born to parents surveyed, about 137,600 had heart problems.

The new analysis, published in the European Journal of Heart Disease Prevention, concluded that parental smoking is strongly linked to the risk of developing fetal heart disease and that the risk increases by 25 percent when mothers smoke during pregnancy.

This link becomes stronger when parents smoke. Compared to non-smoking fetuses, fathers who smoked during pregnancy were 74 percent more likely to have heart problems at birth, while the effect doubles more than twice when mothers smoke secondhand smoke.